The Picture Man

By TOM VANDERBILT

Published: January 19, 2003

EVERY photographer is a photographer of transition. The shutter blinks, confines history to a moment or a mood, but elsewhere, life moves on. The image left behind is part of a world that is already receding.

Bruce Davidson has been taking pictures for more than 50 of his 69 years. Throughout his career, he has been a particular poet of transition, his lens drawn to places and moments on the verge of historical eclipse. Much of his work has documented life outside New York City. There is, for example, his melancholic 1956 series on the ''widow of Montmartre,'' an old Parisian woman who represented a last link to the era of Impressionism. There are also his prelapsarian photographs of the Clyde Beatty traveling circus, taken as tent shows were yielding to indoor coliseum events.

But to walk the hallways of his Upper West Side apartment is to realize instantly that this city is his favorite viewfinder muse.

''You could spend weeks in here,'' he said the other day, gesturing to a towering stack of filed prints and negatives.

''If I sold every print in the collection I could buy the building I'm living in,'' he added, at which point his wife, Emily Haas Davidson, demurred, blushing. ''Not that they're coming knocking,'' he said.

There are other photos on the walls, among them a shot of Marilyn Monroe taken from the doomed desert filming of ''The Misfits'' (''I found Marilyn Monroe a lot more interesting than the horses,'' he said, mischievous eyes peering over his spectacles.) The bulk of the work, however, on the walls or in the books he has arranged on a living room table, is a sprawling visual genealogy of New York. From the subways of the 1980's, where Mr. Davidson found deep chords of humanity amid the ruin and graffiti, to the now-vanished Garden Cafeteria on East Broadway, where Yiddish-speaking intellectuals hunched over newspapers and bialys, his New York, his photographs, are of a city that no longer is.

Yet art hangs on after people and places have moved on. In Mr. Davidson's photographic New York, the city sees itself as it was, and learns something of what it is. Next month, on the heels of ''Time of Change,'' a collection of his photographs from the civil rights era, a new version of ''East 100th Street,'' Mr. Davidson's classic 1970 book of photographs of a block in East Harlem then called the city's ''most notorious slum,'' is being issued by St. Ann's Press, a small publisher of high-quality art books. Some 35 never-before-published photographs are included. In a career that has included books like ''Subway'' and ''Brooklyn Gang,'' award-winning films and countless exhibitions, including a current one of the civil rights pictures at the International Center for Photography, his portrait of a single New York block will probably stand as among his most enduring works.

Photographing Inner Space

Mr. Davidson, who was born and raised in Oak Park, Ill., and educated at Yale, got his first glimpse of East Harlem in the late 1950's, when he was living in Hartsdale, N.Y., and commuting to his job in the lab at Eastman Kodak in Manhattan. From the Park Avenue viaduct he would peer into the windows of East Harlem, particularly at night, when the light illuminated a view beyond the brick walls. But not until a decade later did he set out to get beyond those walls, after hearing about a block said to represent the nadir of urban poverty and ruin.

''At the time we were sending rockets to the moon,'' Mr. Davidson said. ''I felt the need to photograph inner space. I wanted to explore the block as an entity, to treat it as a molecular structure.''

For the next two years, he gradually won a place in the community, becoming known as the ''picture man,'' each morning taking still-wet prints to give to his subjects, whom he photographed with a large architectural-view camera.

''I wanted to lend the act of photography a sense of dignity,'' he said. ''This wasn't a 'Candid Camera' running around taking pictures with a noisy motor drive. I wasn't spying or intruding.'''

As a result, his subjects, despite peering out from small, dark rooms (often adorned with images of John F. Kennedy and Jesus Christ), or standing among rubble-and-weed-strewn lots, brim not only with a reverence for the occasion but also with hope and humanity, as if by staring into the lens they were seeing both the best image of themselves and a view of a better world.

Windows are the fragile yet impermeable boundaries between public and private life in New York, so not surprisingly a few of the shots were voyeuristic glimpses of children peering from behind the security gates of gray tenements. More common, however, was an interior shot that showed the life through the window.

''I wanted to explore not only the rooms, but what you saw out the window, across the courtyard and into infinity,'' he said. ''Not only the room, but what the room saw.'' It was a view he had never seen. As Mr. Davidson recalled, ''I was very affected by the mood of the rooms, the little sense of embellishment, the lace curtain, the plastic covering the couch.'' One photograph shows a woman, a young woman, but as Mr. Davidson noted, ''She just looks to me as someone who in her young life has really seen it.'' She is clutching herself on a bed, sheets drawn up around her, exposing a dingy mattress. Behind her in the middle of a tired wall hangs a single object, a heart-shaped Valentine box.